As
a powerful grassroots movement emerges, some want to use it for their
own gain. The history of the Tea Party has important lessons on how to
avoid that

The
fury currently welling up against our demagogue president is a gorgeous
thing. The Women’s March on Washington bowled me over by its sheer
numbers. The town hall meetings calling Republican representatives to
account are delicious payback for decades of phony populism. The
combination of the two is one of the healthiest political developments I
have seen in many years.

But opportunism never sleeps, and with
the rage and the resistance of recent weeks some far less noble
characters have seen a chance to develop a new con. They’re up on the
resistance bandwagon right now, rending their garments, shaking their
fists and praying that no one holds them responsible for the dead end
into which they’ve steered us over the years. Inveighing loudly against
Trump has become, for the people I am describing, a means of rescuing an
ideology that has proven a disaster.

Comparing this moment with
the Tea Party tells us a lot about this misdirection. In its 2009
heyday, the Tea Party represented a kind of superficial secession from
the Republican party, which had discredited itself with the series of
disasters we call the George W Bush presidency. Throw the old leaders
out, the Tea Party seemed to demand, and start fresh.

But that’s
not really what happened then, and it’s probably not going to happen
with the hack politicians, million-dollar consultants and smug
journalists who led Democrats to utter powerlessness this time around.

Yes,
the Tea Party brought down many Republicans, but in truth it was a way
of rebranding the same old Republican party without the stink of George W
Bush attached. Conservative activists back then looked out over an
economic disaster brought on by libertarian idealism – by a generation
that worshiped bank deregulation – and insisted that what we needed was more deregulation, that we needed to go full-on free market. That’s the achievement of the Tea Party.

There
is a possibility that the resistance to Trump will turn out the same
way – that it will become a vehicle for our Enron Democrats to avoid
accountability. “I don’t think people want a new direction,” House
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in December. Now is not the moment
for infighting, others have insisted, but for unity and togetherness.
Unity behind the existing leadership, that is. Changing the personnel in
the C-Suites will only weaken us, they will say; hell, we can’t even
afford to see our leaders criticized.

And so the thinkers
of the “center left” proceed to hold their failed leaders above
scrutiny and to redouble their commitment to the shabby ideology that
allowed Trump to win. Former prime minister Tony Blair, the British face
of Clintonism and one of the principal forces behind the Iraq war has
been doing just this. Writing the
other day in the New York Times, Blair used his audience’s horror at
the Trump phenomenon as an excuse to urge them into battle against, yes,
the left.

Sebastian
Gorka, President Trump’s top counter-terrorism adviser, is a formal
member of a Hungarian far-right group that is listed by the U.S. State
Department as having been “under the direction of the Nazi Government of
Germany” during World War II, leaders of the organization have told the
Forward.

The elite order, known as the Vitézi Rend, was
established as a loyalist group by Admiral Miklos Horthy, who ruled
Hungary as a staunch nationalist from 1920 to October 1944. A
self-confessed anti-Semite, Horthy imposed restrictive Jewish laws prior
to World War II and collaborated with Hitler during the conflict. His
cooperation with the Nazi regime included the deportation of hundreds of
thousands of Jews into Nazi hands.

Gorka’s membership in the
organization — if these Vitézi Rend leaders are correct, and if Gorka
did not disclose this when he entered the United States as an immigrant —
could have implications for his immigration status. The State
Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual specifies that members of the Vitézi Rend “are presumed to be inadmissible” to the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Gorka
— who Vitézi Rend leaders say took a lifelong oath of loyalty to their
group — did not respond to multiple emails sent to his work and personal
accounts, asking whether he is a member of the Vitézi Rend and, if so,
whether he disclosed this on his immigration application and on his
application to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2012. The White House
also did not respond to a request for comment.

But Bruce
Einhorn, a retired immigration judge who now teaches nationality law at
Pepperdine University, said of this, “His silence speaks volumes.”

The
group to which Gorka reportedly belongs is a reconstitution of the
original group on the State Department list, which was banned in Hungary
until the fall of Communism in 1989. There are now two organizations in
Hungary that claim to be the heirs of the original Vitézi Rend, with
Gorka, according to fellow members, belonging to the so-called
“Historical Vitézi Rend.” Though it is not known to engage in violence,
the Historical Vitézi Rend upholds all the nationalist and oftentimes
racial principles of the original group as established by Horthy.

Einhorn
said these nuances did not relieve Gorka of the obligation, if he’s a
member, to disclose his affiliation when applying for his visa or his
citizenship.

“This is a group that advocates racialist nativism,”
said Einhorn. If Gorka did not disclose his affiliation with it, he
said, this would constitute “failure to disclose a material fact,” which
could undermine the validity of both his immigration status and claim
to citizenship.

The author of Listen Liberal looks prescient in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory.

Perhaps Thomas Frank should have added an exclamation mark to the title of his latest book. As it was, Listen Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? largely fell on deaf ears when it was initially released
in April 2016. Echoing arguments frequently made by Bernie Sanders
during the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Frank's pointed
polemic attacked the Clintons, Rahm Emanuel, and the mainstream
Democratic Party for abandoning America's working people in favor of
Wall Street and the professional classes. But the mainstream media and
political commentators mostly shunned the book until after Election
Day—when it suddenly looked prescient. On November 9, it was listed in
the New York Times article "Six Books to Help Understand Trump's Win."

The
liberals, in other words, are listening now—even if it's too late to
avoid the horrors of a Trump presidency. Back on the road promoting the
paperback edition, Frank will appear for a reading at the Seminary Co-op
Bookstore in Hyde Park on March 27. But despite the recent attention
his analysis is getting, the onetime Chicagoan and cofounder of the Baffler isn't necessarily more hopeful about the Democratic Party than he was a year ago.

When we spoke last year, there was a media silence around your book. How much has that changed?

The
book has sold well, lots of people have read it, I get a lot of
e-mails, and people talk about it all the time. But the national
American media is still not interested, by and large. It's weird because
in other countries I'm on TV and radio all the time. I just came back
from Australia and Scandinavia, and both places were very interested in
it. The same is true in Canada and in the UK.

How do you explain the greater interest abroad?

They're
very worried about Trump overseas. In Australia they're worried he
might get them into a war. The other thing is that a lot of these
countries think they're going to have their own Trump one of these days.
If you look at what's happening to these left parties in Europe—they're
getting slaughtered. It's happening all over the place.

What do you think blinded the Democrats and liberals to your critique?

That's
a good question. The Democrats had all these postmortems and "What went
wrong?" inquiries, but they refuse to admit they did anything wrong.
For a long time, these people denied that the working class was walking
away from the Democratic Party. Now they see it's plain and then switch
to a new line of thinking: "Well, there's nothing we can do to win those
people back, because the only possible appeal is to become a more
racist party, and we're not interested in that."

So they're
determined not to adopt left populism, which is what the Democratic
Party used to do. The problem is that for the Clinton wing of the party,
it's essential to their identity that they turn their backs on that
kind of politics. That's who they are. They can't go back now.

It
also seems like a lot of Democrats have used the Russian hacking
scandal and the alleged Putin-Trump ties to paper over flaws with their
own party. It was like, "Putin hacked the election so why should we
change?"

Yes, they've made plenty of excuses. And as far as
excuses go, it's pretty lame. The Comey intervention had a much bigger
impact. And you know what had a bigger impact still, which they never
talk about? The big increase in Obamacare premiums a few weeks before
the election. I couldn't believe that Barack Obama didn't move heaven
and earth to keep it from happening. Secondly, the [Trans-Pacific
Partnership]. What the hell was Obama thinking pushing it right up until
the end while poor Hillary was out there trying to distance herself
from it? When you talk about blunders, those were worse than Russia—if
it was Russia—stealing John Podesta's e-mail.

Timothy Snyder warns: History gives us a bunch of cases where democratic republics became authoritarian regimes.

How
close is President Donald Trump to following the path blazed by last
century’s tyrants? Could American democracy be replaced with
totalitarian rule? There’s enough resemblance that Yale historian
Timothy Snyder, who studies fascist and communist regime change and
totalitarian rule, has written a book warning about the threat and
offering lessons for resistance and survival. The author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century talked to AlterNet’s Steven Rosenfeld.

Steven Rosenfeld:
Three weeks ago, you said that the country has perhaps a year “to
defend American democracy.” You said what happens in the next few weeks
is crucial. Are you more concerned than ever that our political culture
and institutions are evolving toward fascism, resembling key aspects of
the early 20th-century European regimes you’ve studied?

Timothy Snyder: Let me answer you in three parts. The first thing is that the 20 lessons that I wrote, I wrote on Nov. 15. The book, On Tyranny,
was done by Christmas. Which means if people read it now, and people
are reading it, and it’s describing the world they are in, that means
I’ve successfully made predictions based on history. We’re going to talk
about what is going to come, but I want to point out that timeline — it
was basically completely blind. But the book does describe what is
going on now.

The year figure is there because we have to
recognize that things move fast. Nazi Germany took about a year. Hungary
took about two and a half years. Poland got rid of the top-level
judiciary within a year. It’s a rough historical guess, but the point is
because there is an outside limit, you therefore have to act now. You
have to get started early. It’s just very practical advice. It’s the
meta-advice of the past: That things slip out of reach for you,
psychologically very quickly and then legally almost as quickly. It’s
hard for people to act when they feel other people won’t act. It’s hard
for people to act when they feel like they have to break the law to do
so. So it is important to get out in front before people face those
psychological and legal barriers.

Am I more worried now? I realize
that was your question. No, I’m exactly as worried as I was before, in
November. I think that the people who inhabit the White House inhabit a
different ideological world in which they would like for the United
States not to be the constitutional system that it now is. I was
concerned about that in November. I’m concerned about it now. Nothing
that has happened since has changed the way I see things.

SR:
Let’s talk about how this evolution takes place. You’ve written about
how “post-truth is pre-fascism.” You talk about leaders ignoring facts,
law and history. How far along this progression are we? I’m wondering
where you might see things going next.

TS: That’s
tough because what history does is give you a whole bunch of cases
where democratic republics become authoritarian regimes; sometimes
fascist regimes, sometimes communist regimes. It doesn’t give you one
storyline: A, B, C, D. It gives you a bunch of clusters of A, and a
bunch of clusters of C. But factuality is really important and more
important than people realize, because it’s the substructure of regime
change.

We think about democracy, and that’s the word that
Americans love to use, democracy, and that’s how we characterize our
system. But if democracy just means going to vote, it’s pretty
meaningless. Russia has democracy in that sense. Most authoritarian
regimes have democracy in that sense. Nazi Germany had democracy in that
sense, even after the system had fundamentally changed.

Democracy
only has substance if there’s the rule of law. That is, if people
believe that the votes are going to be counted and they are counted. If
they believe that there’s a judiciary out there that will make sense of
things if there’s some challenge. If there isn’t rule of law, people
will be afraid to vote the way they want to vote. They’ll vote for their
own safety as opposed to their convictions. So the thing we call
democracy depends on the rule of law. And the things we call the rule of
law depends upon trust. Law functions 99 percent of the time
automatically. It functions because we think it’s out there. And that,
in turn, depends on the sense of truth. So there’s a mechanism here. You
can get right to heart of the matter if you can convince people that
there is no truth. Which is why the stuff that we characterize as
post-modern and might dismiss is actually really, really essential.

The
second thing about “post-truth is pre-fascism” is I’m trying to get
people’s attention, because that is actually how fascism works. Fascism
says, disregard the evidence of your senses, disregard observation,
embolden deeds that can’t be proven, don’t have faith in God but have
faith in leaders, take part in collective myth of an organic national
unity and so forth. Fascism was precisely about setting the whole
Enlightenment aside and then selling what sort of myths emerged. Now
those [national] myths are pretty unpredictable, and contingent on
different nations and different leaders and so on, but to just set facts
aside is actually the fastest catalyst. So that part concerns me a lot.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Instead,
we have as president an unhinged narcissistic child who tweets absurd
lies and holds rallies to prop up his fragile ego, whose conflicts of
financial interest are ubiquitous, and whose presidency is under a “gray
cloud” of suspicion (according to the Republican chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee) for colluding with Russian agents to obtain
office in the 2016 election.

He’s advised by his daughter, his son-in-law, and an oddball who once ran a white supremacist fake-news outlet.

His
cabinet is an assortment of billionaires, CEOs, veterans of Wall
Street, and ideologues, none of whom has any idea about how to govern
and most of whom don’t believe in the laws their departments are in
charge of implementing anyway.

He has downgraded or eviscerated
groups responsible for giving presidents professional advice on foreign
policy, foreign intelligence, economics, science, and domestic policy.
He gets most of what he learns from television.

Meanwhile,
Congress is in the hands of Republicans who for years have only said
“no,” who have become expert at stopping whatever a president wants to
do but don’t have a clue how to initiate policy, most of whom have never
passed a budget into law, and, more generally, don’t much like
government and have not shared responsibility for governing the nation.

As
a result of all this, the most powerful nation in the world with the
largest economy in the world is rudderless and leaderless.

Where
we need thoughtful resolve we have thoughtless name-calling. Where we
need democratic deliberation we have authoritarian rants and rallies.
Where we need vision we have myopia.

The only way out of this
crisis of governance is for us – the vast majority of Americans who
deserve and know better – to take charge. Your country needs you
desperately.

To the "antifa" movement, cowardly liberals are nearly as bad as Donald Trump and the white nationalist right

Since
the election of Donald Trump as president, liberals and leftists have
been discussing how to best respond to American conservatism’s
transformation from a shopworn, Cold War, anti-government philosophy
into something else.

To the anarchists and socialists who consider themselves part of the global “antifa” movement
(an abbreviation for “anti-fascist”), the transition currently taking
place on the right is all too familiar. The rise of the alt-right and
white nationalism within the U.S. is something the mainstream left
doesn’t take seriously enough, they say, even as many Democrats compare
Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.

If it is true that the civic
nationalism of Trump and his top strategist Steve Bannon are helping to
lay the groundwork for a more radical right — intentionally or otherwise
— then their self-described opponents on the left need to do more than
wear safety pins and post Facebook denunciations of the president they
didn’t vote for say the antifa advocates.

As Natasha Lennard, a former staff writer for Salon, wrote earlier this year for the Nation that
coming to such a realization is difficult for many people on the left.
Despite their posture of desiring radical change, most leftists are
actually conservative in a certain sense:

Liberals
cling to institutions: They begged to no avail for faithless electors,
they see “evisceration” in a friendly late-night talk-show debate, they
put faith in investigations and justice with regards to Russian
interference and business conflicts of interest. They grasp at
hypotheticals about who could have won, were things not as they in fact
are. For political subjects so tied to the mythos of Reason, it is
liberals who now seem deranged.

Instead of merely
talking among themselves about opposing racism, say the anti-fascists,
leftists need to take direct action to make being a white nationalist as
difficult as possible. That’s why many antifa proponents have
concentrated their efforts on tactics such as targeting the financial
means of support for websites they see as enabling or promoting fascist
views; they have even engaged in acts of physical assault against
members of the far right.

“Only by fighting and destroying fascism can we actually defeat it,” an anonymous member of the website It’s Going Down told Salon via email.

The
antifas’ anonymity is one of several superficial characteristics they
share with their bitter rivals on the alt-right. Another is that they
take politics much more soberly than their less extreme counterparts do.
For the antifas, understanding that white nationalists are deadly
serious about instigating a “racial holy war” is the key to countering
them.

“During the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, while
anarchists and communists were literally fighting the fascists in the
streets, the liberals and social democrats attempted to debate the Nazis
point for point in the halls of power,” the anonymous activist
continued. “This did nothing, and also normalized the positions of the
Nazis and also made them into legitimate positions.”

The
center-left’s desire for an open society is its critical weakness,
members of a Nebraska-based antifa collective told Salon via email
because viewpoints that want to deny all free speech cannot be allow to
speak freely.

“We
become depressed when we look around and see 1100 white supremacist
militia groups, and some of our names at the top [of their kill lists]!
You say ‘Oh my god, they got 1100 right-wing militia groups—how many
left-wing ones we got?’ ‘Well, we’re working on our journal…’ I got
nothing against journals, but it’s lopsided!’”

We
live in a historical moment where everything seems upside down. A
proto-fascist seemingly despised by the political establishment has
ridden into the White House. That same establishment is now squirmingly
trying to accommodate itself
to that which it formerly despised. Social media—once thought of as the
domain of lefty social justice warriors—turned out to be the far-right’s pathway
to power. And while the reactionary candidate praised “the common man,”
the liberal candidate gave secret speeches to Wall Street.

Now is
the time to reconsider long-held preconceptions, as they embody
precisely the thinking which led us to this point—this point where hate
crimes against minorities are growing, and economic and ecological hopes
are rapidly shrinking. At a juncture where liberals’ wholesale
denunciation of “violence” and “gun culture” are revealed to have done
nothing to reduce either one, the Left needs to disentangle the issue of
oppressive force from that of necessary self-defense against oppressive force. Brutality
against minorities is escalating in the aftermath of the election, and
we can only imagine what level it will reach as the Trump administration
entrenches itself. Reports of attacks are too numerous to recount here,
but the recent murders of a famous Black athlete (Joe McKnight) a young
Black musician (Will Sims) and a 15-year old Black boy (James Means)
are the most notable manifestations of the racist terror which is
growing across the country. As the federal exoneration of George
Zimmerman demonstrates, a state crackdown on such murders has never been
in the cards, and will be even more remote under the Trump regime.

Reports from the BBC
and other major news outlets show that gun ownership in the Black
community has begun to grow in recent years. A Pew survey shows at least
54 percent of African-Americans have a favorable view of firearms, up
from just 29 percent in 2012. The last poll was taken in 2014—in the years since then, a Southern Christian Leadership Council official has publicly called for armed self-defense, and Black Twitter, in the face of the Charleston massacre, has trended the hashtag #WeWillShootBack—so today the figures are likely higher.

One of the first arenas of that
struggle was the campaign to expose lynching in Mississippi,
specifically the 1954 murder of Emmett Till. The key organizer of that
campaign, TRM Howard,
not only carried guns for his own protection, but made sure that there
were armed guards at all times around campaign spokespeople like Mamie
Till. After the rise of Martin Luther King, nonviolence became the image
of civil rights, but this nominally pacifist movement never renounced
its right to bear arms. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) came to the Deep South to organize, they encountered a
vigorous Black gun culture among those who were prepared to campaign for
equality. Fannie Lou Hamer, legendary founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), told one interviewer that, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom
and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on
my porch won’t write his mama again.” Prior to the MFDP’s work, voter
suppression of African-Americans was the rule in Mississippi, but after
its ascendance in the late 1960s, Blacks had full ballot access and the
Klan was in retreat. The Mississippi movement represents the most
effective organizing of the post-war Left; Their policy on armed
self-defense can teach us a great deal, particularly as the whole
country begins to feel more and more like the Jim Crow South.

But
aren’t guns inherently oppressive, reactionary and patriarchal? This
idea has found currency in the years since the end of the civil rights
movement, but the years since the civil rights movement haven’t been
especially good for the Left. From Jimmy Carter to Obama—not to mention
from Reagan to Trump—the US has steadily slid to the Right in all but
the most superficial ways. In place of working-class activists like
Fannie Lou Hamer, we’re now led by pseudo-working-class celebrities like
Michael Moore, who cemented the gun control consensus with his
sensationalized documentary Bowling for Columbine. Just as
Moore denounces the Democratic Party in three year cycles but always
comes back to them at election time, his film admitted that there are
more important factors contributing to violence than guns, but finally
dumped the whole problem at the feet of the NRA. It is revealing that
the very same Hollywood establishment that gave Moore an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine proceeded to boo him at the ceremony for opposing the Iraq War.
For them, gun control has nothing to do with genuine peace, but
everything to do with an orderly and centralized capitalist empire.

It’s
inevitable that liberals’ perception of guns is formed hegemonically
through the mainstream news media, despite the Left’s claim to be
skeptical of it. While such outlets often tell us that guns kill 33,000
people per year in the US, we’re seldom reminded that alcohol kills over 80,000, and prescription drugs kill a devastating 120,000 each year. This may have something to do with the fact that pharmaceutical companies give corporate media over $5 billion per year in advertising, alcohol companies spend $2 billion
on the same, and gun manufacturers comparatively nothing. The
conventional liberal wisdom is that gun advocates make up for this in
lobbying dollars, but shockingly, prescription opioid manufacturers
alone spend eight times more courting politicians than the NRA does. Perhaps the gun lobby would like to spend more, but as The New York Times once acknowledged, “guns are a relatively small business in the United States.”

The view from Steve Bannon’s propaganda site will scare the bejeezus out of you, which is its point.

The
home page of Breitbart.com, the quasi-official voice of Steve Bannon’s
White House, is a virtual stew of menace, a pit of monsters, an unending
onslaught of apocalyptic horsemen rearing up at full gallop, coming straight at you, drawing closer…. But what the Breitbart
reader is not being warned against is poisoned water, eviction, a
melting glacier, a rising sea, a pauper’s grave, a burning cross, a bank
swindle or a loss of medical care. Those are the kind of fears that
afflict liberal wimps brainwashed by “the enemy of the people.”

A Breitbart
reader quivers, all right, hunkered down in the safe spaces of Fortress
America while enemies gather outside the gates. But what he or she
needs protection from is, to take a recent dozen, (1) a “mass-murdering bureaucrat”; (2) an armed home invader in Louisiana who demanded money and wouldn’t accept food stamps; (3) naked, mushroom-crazed brothers running amok through an apartment complex in Indianapolis; (4) machete and axe attacks in Germany; (5) a woman in Belgium suspected of plotting a terror attack; (6) man-hating Swedish feminists; and, speaking of Sweden, (7) a growing number of fatal shootings there, and also there, (8) a suspected car bomb; and back at home, (9) a Trump-defying Paul Ryan who “targets his own Republicans, not Democrats, on Health Care”; (10) Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) warning that the CIA is spearheading “authoritarian government”; (11) to our north, “Women Kicked Out of Women’s Shelter to Make Room for a ‘Transgender’ Man,” and, if you like your fright more graphic, (12) “Mexican Cartel Spreads ISIS-Like Beheading Video to Gain Border Turf near Texas.”

And
the next thing you know, when you’ve barely recovered from reading
about the machete mayhem in Germany, here comes a report of tear gas
released into the Hamburg metro.
How dangerous is that? It depends where you look. If you read all the
way to the bottom of the post, you earn this correction: “Due to a
translation error, the original version of this article said 50 people
were injured. In fact 50 people on the train were affected and at least
six people are known to have been injured so far.”

In tune with Steve Bannon’s watered-down remake of Apocalypse Now, the world is going to hell. There are vultures, vultures everywhere. There is not only “American carnage”
but European carnage, carnage just over the border, the French covering
up for the sinister Mexicans, carnage sloshing throughout the entire
Judeo-Christian world — though the agitated reader will occasionally
find consolation in the bull market and in the knowledge that US Marines
are “inching closer” to the ISIS-held Syrian city of Raqqa.

This reader will not learn from Breitbart that those Marines constitute a single artillery unit that, according to Reuters, has not yet opened fire. Odds are that this reader takes Breitbart’s word about Scandinavian carnage — a theme that’s now been beaten to death by the man in the White House
— and will fail to dive deeper into the official Swedish murder
statistics, so as to discover, for example, that between 2001-05 and
2011-15, deadly violence declined,
although guns were more frequently used during the latter period, a
fact officially attributed to the growth of gangs. By the way, in 1997,
the rate of murder and manslaughter,
with and without guns, was 1.77 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with
almost four times that rate, 6.80, for the United States — assuming that
one feels like cherry-picking dates to prove points.

You,
unsuspecting reader, you taxpaying innocent, you American babe in the
woods, you, peacefully going on about your business in your apartment
complex, you, pathetically offering up your unacceptable food stamps — They have it in for you. They are everywhere. As the man in the White House said about Obama body language he didn’t approve of: “There’s something going on.”

Don’t
buy what purports to be nationalism that’s engulfed politics in America
and all over the world, former President Bill Clinton said Thursday;
what’s actually at play, he argued, is more insidious and interconnected
than that.

“People who claim to want the nation-state are
actually trying to have a pan-national movement to institutionalize
separatism and division within borders all over the world,” Clinton
said. “It’s like we’re all having an identity crisis at once — and it is
an inevitable consequence of the economic and social changes that have
occurred at an increasingly rapid pace.”

Making his first major
public appearance since his wife lost last year’s presidential election,
Clinton did not discuss President Donald Trump specifically, but warned
repeatedly against “us versus them” thinking that he said has become
such an active part of politics in America, in the Brexit vote, in the
Philippines and throughout Europe.

The speech was the keynote at
an event hosted by the Brookings Institution honoring the late Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“The whole history of humankind is
basically the definition of who is us and who is them, and the question
of whether we should all live under the same set of rules,” Clinton
said. He added that often, people “have found more political success and
met the deep psychic needs people have had to feel that their identity
requires them to be juxtaposed against someone else.”

Does
she feel, perhaps for the first time in her life, that the United
States, her adopted country – the only country on Earth established, at
least according to its foundational documents, on the rights to free
speech, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – wholly and unreservedly
welcomes her as one of its own?

Not necessarily! If the ideology
is Islam (and it is) and the woman is a former Muslim (and she is), she
must steel herself to face threats against her life from her onetime
coreligionists and a hail of invective from, and insidious betrayals by,
those posing as progressives. Moreover, she must prepare to fend off
attempts to silence her viewpoint as “inconvenient” given our current
political morass. Even more egregiously, if the woman is trying to help
(as she is) others also striving after the gloriously secular freedom
she has achieved for herself, she becomes a danger to the entire edifice
of hypocrisy, cowardice, and fact-deficient balderdash forming the
mainstream left’s view of Islam as a “religion of peace” distorted by a
few deranged miscreants. In short, in the America of today, such a brave
woman will find no haven extended to her, but, rather, confront
wielders of figurative pitchforks eager to skewer her for both
abandoning her religion and traducing her kind. And with Donald Trump’s
ascent to the presidency, her position becomes more precarious than
ever.

Such a woman is Sarah Haider, a native of Pakistan who moved
to the United States when she was between seven and eight, and who is
co-founder and director of outreach for Ex-Muslims of North America.
EXMNA, declares its web site, “advocates for acceptance of religious
dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination
faced by those who leave Islam.” It also provides a range of services
(e.g., temporary shelter, counseling) to its members, who are spread out
in eighteen chapters across the continent, and offers a platform from
which ex-Muslims can recount, via Youtube videos, their personal stories of faith-free enlightenment.

Soft-spoken,
articulate, and earnest, Haider hardly fits the image of a sinister,
subversive “native informant” or “house Arab” or “house Muslim” (as she
has been vilified by some on the left) scheming to stir up
“Islamophobia” and spoil life for American Muslims. Haider drifted away
from Islam at age fifteen, but received national attention when, in
2015, she delivered a widely viewed lecture,
“Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique,” at an American Humanist
Association conference in Denver. She has been, since then, hailed as a hero by the neuroscientist and outspoken atheist Sam Harris (the host of the Waking Up podcast) and has appeared on, among other venues, Dave Rubin’s popular Youtube talk show, The Rubin Report.

I
spoke with Haider via Skype one day recently. She told me that things
have only gotten tougher for ex-Muslims since she made her appearance in
Denver, and that she and her fellow apostates live with a level of
threat that influences every aspect of life. (Apostasy is an offence punishable by death, according to Islam, and female apostates in particular, even in the United States, find themselves imperiled.) The more publicity she receives, the more potential danger she has to live with.“Fear
of being exposed has changed how I go about my life and how I
socialize. As I become better known, I feel increasingly isolated.”

Worst of all, she feels so besieged in the United States.

“Ex-Muslims
in the West should be free to be who they are and leave their religion.
At the very least, we shouldn’t have to be fearful of our family and
friends. If Muslims feel they’re being badly treated here [in the United
States], they can go to Muslim-majority countries. But where can a
person like me go? I’m in the safest place I can possibly be, yet I’m
too afraid to tell people where I live. It’s tragic for me that there’s
even a need for our organization.”

Rev. Russell Moore has been praised for challenging the politics of evangelicals

The
Rev. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s
policy arm, was an emerging leader among young evangelicals because, in
part, of his anti-Trump message he preached during the presidential
campaign. But now many white Southern Baptist leaders are questioning
whether Moore can function in his role, which will require him to lobby
before the new Trump administration.Moore, who said he would not
vote for either major party candidate in 2016, was a vocal critic of
President Donald Trump and the evangelical leaders who endorsed him. He accused his colleagues of “normalizing an awful candidate” and refused to drink the Trump “Kool-Aid.”

The 45-year-old reverend is feeling backlash for his blunt opposition to the president, according to a report from The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey.
One megachurch pastor and Trump supporter, Jack Graham, said after a
meeting with Moore that his congregation would withhold $1 million in
donations to the Southern Baptist Convention’s umbrella fund. The move
has Baptists wondering if Moore will be replaced by someone cozier with
the Trump administration.In May, just before clinching the
Republican nomination, Trump attacked Moore in a tweet, insisting that
he was “truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals.”

Results
from the election appear to support Trump’s theory that evangelicals
would rather side with him than a man of the cloth. More than 80 percent
of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the election, according to
exit polls.

But since Moore was elected to his position in 2013,
he has steadily become a beloved leader among younger evangelicals, who
may not be as receptive to conservative politics. Moore is also very
popular among evangelicals of color, who have welcomed his promotion of
racial justice, according to the Post.

Unafraid to deliver public lashings, Moore wrote in December that he has seen a “handful of Christian political operatives excusing immortality and confusing the definition of the gospel.”Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a fellow Southern Baptist, responded to Moore’s persistent commentary by telling Town Hall that he was “utterly stunned that Russell Moore is being paid by Southern Baptists to insult them.”

As
president of the Southern Baptists Convention’s Ethics and Religious
Liberty Commission, Moore reports to a board of trustees who control his
future. The board chairman, Ken Barbic, told the Post in a text that
Moore is a “Gospel-centered, faithful, and prophetic voice for Southern
Baptists” and that he has the full backing of the board.

One of the delegates is the leader of a designated hate group.

WASHINGTON―
An estimated 225 million women in the world who want to avoid pregnancy
lack access to safe and reliable contraceptives. But President Donald Trump
appointed two delegates to the 61st Session of the United Nations
Commission on the Status of Women this week who believe birth control
access is “antithetical to the values and needs of women worldwide.”

The
State Department announced on Monday that it is sending Lisa Correnti,
the executive vice president of the Center for Family and Human Rights,
to “the most important annual meeting on women’s issues at the United
Nations.”

Her
organization has been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty
Law Center. She and the other delegate, Grace Melton, a conservative
activist with the Heritage Foundation, have both criticized feminists
for promoting contraception use, LGBT anti-discrimination efforts and
safe abortion access, according to research by the progressive group
American Bridge.

“Alarmingly,
this radical feminist agenda reduces the diverse economic, political,
and social needs of women around the world to issues of sexuality and
fertility,” Melton wrote in a 2011 article.
“At the U.N., nearly every conversation, forum, and program that
purports to be concerned with women has a monomaniacal focus on such
matters as sexual rights, reproductive health, contraception, and
abortion.”

“Elite
billionaires and powerful governments use the guise of ‘helping poor
women’ to extract permanent funding for abortion-promoting and
population control groups,” the group said in
a 2012 statement on the London Summit on Family Planning.
“Contraception will have a higher priority than education, basic health
care, infrastructure, and economic improvements - diverting funding from
measures that empower women and communities. None of the contraception
programs help pregnant women or newborns.”

Trump
told Congress in his recent address that he intends to “invest in
women’s health.” But he has made it clear, with these appointments and
other policy moves, that his administration does not support increased
access to reproductive health care globally. In one of his first acts as
president, he reinstated the global gag rule,
which withholds U.S. foreign aid funding to international health
organizations that counsel women on family planning options that include
abortion. The gag rule, first put in place by President Ronald Reagan
in 1984, has forced has forced health providers “to fire staff, reduce
their services or even close their clinics altogether,” according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The true impact of activism may not be felt for a generation. That alone is reason to fight, rather than surrender to despair

Last
month, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden had a public conversation
about democracy, transparency, whistleblowing and more. In the course of
it, Snowden – who was of course Skyping in from Moscow – said that
without Ellsberg’s example he would not have done what he did to expose
the extent to which the NSA was spying on millions of ordinary people.
It was an extraordinary declaration. It meant that the consequences of
Ellsberg’s release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971 were not
limited to the impact on a presidency and a war in the 1970s. The
consequences were not limited to people alive at that moment. His act
was to have an impact on people decades later – Snowden was born 12
years after Ellsberg risked his future for the sake of his principles.
Actions often ripple far beyond their immediate objective, and
remembering this is reason to live by principle and act in hope that
what you do matters, even when results are unlikely to be immediate or
obvious.

The
most important effects are often the most indirect. I sometimes wonder
when I’m at a mass march like the Women’s March a month ago whether the
reason it matters is because some unknown young person is going to find
her purpose in life that will only be evident to the rest of us when she
changes the world in 20 years, when she becomes a great liberator.

I
began talking about hope in 2003, in the bleak days after the war in
Iraq was launched. Fourteen years later, I use the term hope because it
navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of
pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both.
Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism
assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing.
Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that
we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able write
it ourselves.

Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an
understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s informed, astute
open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we may play in it.
Hope looks forward, but it draws its energies from the past, from
knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and
imperfections. It means not being the perfect that is the enemy of the
good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming you
know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what
happens is up to us.

We are complex creatures. Hope and anguish
can coexist within us and in our movements and analyses. There’s a scene
in the new movie about James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, in which
Robert Kennedy predicts, in 1968, that in 40 years there will be a black
president. It’s an astonishing prophecy since four decades later Barack
Obama wins the presidential election, but Baldwin jeers at it because
the way Kennedy has presented it does not acknowledge that even the most
magnificent pie in the sky might comfort white people who don’t like
racism but doesn’t wash away the pain and indignation of black people
suffering that racism in the here and now. Patrisse Cullors, one of the
founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s
mission as “rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and
dreams”. The vision of a better future doesn’t have to deny the crimes
and sufferings of the present; it matters because of that horror.

I have been moved and thrilled and amazed by the strength, breadth, depth and generosity of the resistance to the Trump administration
and its agenda. I did not anticipate anything so bold, so pervasive,
something that would include state governments, many government
employees from governors and mayors to workers in many federal
departments, small towns in red states, new organizations like the 6,000
chapters of Indivisible reportedly formed since the election, new and
fortified immigrant-rights groups, religious groups, one of the biggest
demonstrations in American history with the Women’s March on 21 January,
and so much more.

Last week, I wrote in the New York Times about my concerns, as a Zionist feminist, with the March 8 International Women’s Strike. Because the platform for the strike
called for the “decolonization of Palestine” as part of “the beating
heart of this new feminist movement” and one of its prominent
organizers, Rasmea Odeh, is a convicted terrorist, I feared there was no
room for a feminist like myself who believes Israel has a right to
exist. As I noted then, “Increasingly, I worry that my support for
Israel will bar me from the feminist movement that, in aiming to be
inclusive, has come to insist that feminism is connected to a wide
variety of political causes.”

On Monday, The Nation published an interview
by Collier Meyerson with Linda Sarsour, one of the leaders of the
January 21 Women’s March. I respect the work Sarsour has done to
organize and promote the Women’s March, and I admire the way she has
committed so much of her life to feminism. However, I was disappointed
that Meyerson’s interview with Sarsour failed to address the actual
concerns I presented in the New York Times.

For one,
Meyerson and Sarsour glossed over the fact that I explicitly wrote at
the outset, “I hope for a two-state solution and am critical of certain
Israeli government policies.” Ignoring that basic tenet of my
perspective is a serious misrepresentation that seems all too convenient
for Sarsour.Incidentally, Sarsour appears to openly oppose the two-state solution — the very two-state solution championed by Bernie Sanders
in February at J Street’s national conference, where he criticized
Donald Trump for waffling on it. (Sarsour’s opposition to two states
does not seem very progressive to me, but let’s put that aside.)

Sarsour
then made an insinuation that was both presumptuous and inaccurate.
“It’s been a little surprising to the [right-wing Zionists] to see
[Palestinian-American] women in leadership roles in social-justice
movements,” she said, “because [they are realizing] it means that the
Palestinian Liberation Movement and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement
are gaining traction among young people and people of color in the
United States.” Not only do I not identify as a “right-wing Zionist,” as
previously mentioned, but I certainly do not find the leadership of
Palestinian women to be “surprising” or anything less than positive.

I sincerely hope women of all backgrounds take on feminist leadership roles. However, I draw a hard line at convicted terrorists, like Rasmea Odeh.
Let’s be clear, Odeh was convicted for her role in a bombing that
killed two Jewish college students at Hebrew University in a trial
deemed fair by an observer from the International Red Cross.
Though she disputes her conviction, Odeh has never denied being a
member of the U.S. and European Union-designated terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Tellingly, Meyerson and Sarsour conveniently do not address Odeh’s
history, even though it formed a substantial part of my piece — so much
so that the Times chose to feature her picture on the page.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson